


the roots that clutch

by crownlessliestheking



Series: Spooky Elf Jail [1]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Corruption, Gen, Horror, Horror Elements, Mild Lovecraftian Influence, Mirkwood, Purple Prose, Spiders Bad...Elves Worse?, quick fic, spooky vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27090106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/crownlessliestheking
Summary: The Elves of Mirkwood are not like their kin, they are less wise and more dangerous.
Series: Spooky Elf Jail [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981931
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	the roots that clutch

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot.

**'The Elves of Mirkwood are not like their kin, they are less wise and more dangerous.'**

**-Beorn.**

* * *

The woods were green once.

They teemed with life, were awash in brilliant colors like the fluttering of the wings of a thousand butterflies. Flowers bloomed in the meadows, sunlight dappled the leaves and the ground as the great boughs of the trees reached ever upwards in yearning for more. The path was clear, well-tended, and travellers oft strayed off of it without fear of danger, lured in by curiosity and the slim hope of encountering those who dwelt in the fair Greenwood. And above it all, the ruins of Dol Guldur towered, made impotent by the light. Its thirst was slaked by the blood of kings, once. Now it must but wait, and the darkness is not patient.

The woods were green once. But that was then, and this is now.

Now, the ruins stir and writhe and foul things breed in the shadows. The sound of deer, of laughter, is gone from the wood as if it had never existed in the first place; now, there is naught but the rustling of dying leaves in mottled black and brown as they consume the light of sun and stars alike, ever-hungry, ever-dying, and the clicking of a thousand spiders as they weave their webs, bolder.

And beneath it all sits the Elvenking, languishing on a throne of polished wood, his crown of blood-red holly and thorn, his eyes keener and sharper than any blade. There is something crystalline about him; looking at him is like looking at a cracked mirror. He is the oldest things in these woods, now. He endures, but he does not heal. He endures, and he rots from within.

Beneath it all sprawl his cavernous halls, far from the light. There are no spiders here, but the air remains thick as if it were clogged with webs; the gloom penetrates here, too, from the sickly white mushrooms that sprout in the corners, to the way the walls cave when pressed too hard, wet, sticky, wanting.

They beat with a pale imitation of life.

The Elvenking rarely ventures forth from the walls of his palace; he has not seen the light of the stars in centuries. But nor does he care for it, beloved as they are to fairer folk. They pale in comparison to the searing bright-hot pain of dragonfire and its descent, their desolation is nothing to that which lies on his doorstep and in his mind.

The halls of the palace under the wood are lit dimly by flickering fire that is reluctant to be kindled, that offers no warmth. A chill lies over those halls, damp pervasive, stealing into bones and hearts and carving a place for itself there with savage claws. The Elvenking has long since forgotten what it feels like to be warm.

The sun no longer dapples the ground of the wood, but even if it had, it has never touched his hallowed halls.

He does not miss that, either.

The shadow over the wood lengthens, the days grow darker and greyer, and yet the uneasy flames remain a constant and time stretches lazy into stagnation.

There is no sound in the halls but the quiet susurration of voices speaking from every direction, their words unintelligible. The air itself consumes those to fuel its heavy silence that lies thick over the mouths of those who remain and curls tight in the lungs of any who dare speak words it does not wish to hear. It hurts to breathe, in the Mirkwood. It hurts to think.

Some of the voices do not belong to Elves. Some of the voices do not belong to anyone at all, but they are the loudest, borne by the wind through the trees, their words echoed by the twisted chitter of the spiders. They murmur sweet and seductive in turn, dance above the manic fluting notes of Elven music in the darkened woods and steal into dreamless sleep to poison the mind.

Wine helps. But only for so long. It deadens the senses only until the drinker realizes that ignorance is not bliss.

The woods were green once, and the music of birds flew above the trees, but spiders eat even song and especially singers, and the Elves are furtive with their own, spinning notes to traps to lure in the unwary. The spiders are not often unwary, but they cannot resist such easy bait. Travellers, such few as they are now, are often unwary.

To leave the path now is to never find it again, but the path has a life of its own, too; it wishes to be lost. It is half-subsumed, gone the way of its predecessor stolen by shadow. It is of crumbling stone and ivy, old beyond its years, cracks wicked for tripping and rock rough for ripping skin from hands and knees and heads. Its stones too thirst for blood, not the blackslick ichor of spiders and orcs. They echo with the tramp of armies and shed water in disgust.

The Elvenking’s halls shudder with the thunder of it, but they have lasted millennia the same. These are the storms that now reach the floors of the Mirkwood.

No army would dare the path. Only the desperate and the foolish, and both are easily picked off by arrows or venom, lured or stolen from the path in turn. Their bones lie where they fall, cracked open and drained of marrow and left to molder and rot. Their blood is the only water for the trees, and the grasping roots suck it up eagerly. What they do not, the starving earth takes for itself and snarls in a wordless command for more.

The Elves guard their wood viciously from all intruders. Throats are slit and flesh partitioned for their forest, all the while they dance lightly upon the mat of dead leaves under the watchful eyes of their king. He is fiercer for his silence, more fey for the coldness of his demeanour. Even the spiders fall silent on the rare occasion where his footsteps grace the soil. Maggots spring from the earth and writhe, a thousand white worms that are crushed to nothing a moment later by the steps of his retinue.

He only leaves his halls at night. He only leaves his halls to feast, when the hunger of the wood grows into a swollen, furious thing, bloated with its own greed, and gnaws at the hollowness within him. He does not eat but he sits upon the throne that rises from the earth, a twisted mass of rotted wood in the heart of a great tree, and he watches sharp teeth tear into the flesh of a great boar from the forest, the meat rare enough that blood drips down pointed chins. He watches spindly fingers pull great strips of it from the bone and red tongues lick them clean. He watches throats bob greedily as wine and blood spills down them, watches the red-dark liquid fall to the earth and feels the sigh of it beneath his feet.

His face is a ruin, those nights, the desolation within manifesting without. He is the point of a dagger, the ragged carved path a sword leaves as it cleaves through flesh. He is hollow but filled with anguish and darkness and that from within and that from without have mingled until they are indistinguishable. What is corruption from the Shadow when the shadow is in the self?

He does not eat meat.

He has berries, bloodred and nightblack to eat, and they burst tart on his tongue before souring, curdling, rotting before his teeth can crush them. He has a lone apple, virulent green, and it crunches like bone as he bites into it. The noise is nothing to the cacophony of the feast as his subjects gorge themselves to full, to bursting, to gluttony to put the Spider-Mother herself to shame, may her name be damned to the Everlasting Darkness where she still weaves her webs in oblivion.

Silence falls when he stands, quiet but for the distant click and shudder of a spider in the trees. Blasphemous creatures, they bow only to another lord, and tenuously at that. The eyes of the Elves are bright and hungry, and the Elvenking’s voice splits the silence like a thunderclap, like a spear through a chest, like the splintering of wood.

“Music,” he says simply.

And the woods erupt in a violent twist of song. Flutes, viols, the beating heart of the drum beneath it all. A war song, though they do not know it yet. Voices pitch high and howl, as wolves to the moon, and they revel.

The Elvenking does not dance. He does not sing. He does nothing but tap one finger to the beat, and the edges of his robes fray where he sits in the shadow of the tree.

He watches, and in the ruin of his face, dead eyes dance too.

What is royalty but a mirror of the ruled?


End file.
